A love story

Christmas day, nothing on the telly as usual, then I notice BBC 4 has Swan Lake. I amuse myself until eight o’clock, miss the deep and meaningful introduction as I raid the fridge and settle down just as the overture starts.

I enjoy a lot of jumping around, the sets and costumes and it’s not until the third act that a thought occurs to me. What is this all about?

The progress on stage is so seemingly slow that I have a mo to pick up my tablet and Google for a plot summary and the names of the characters. I realise that all this information is sat on the laps of the live audience in their programmes and is missing for folks at home! Anyway, it’s a fairly simple plot and I finally get what all the miming has been about (how about ballet with speech and singing!)

If you don’t know the plot then have a read on line as I don’t have space here.

Sometime in the night I wake up and run the plot through my mind again. It’s a fairy story, right? That means it’s about as real and as useful as fairies are in the twenty first century, right? Well wrong.

I realise that the story is considerably more profound than even the twenty quid programme lets on.

There is a lake full of white fluffy swans, about twenty four of them as far as I could see on the telly but they did keep moving around a lot so it could have been twenty eight. Anyway the lake represents the world (round world, round lake – please keep up) and the souls who have been turned into swans are us…that is humans, spending our short lives going around in circles and basically asleep. Only Odette is able to become human again in the night time. (Just like me waking up in the night and being profound). She represents the two states of being alive and being dead. She is dead when she is alive (an enchanted swan) and alive at night (a human soul in the spirit world).

The prince is unimpressed by the marriage proposals of the best beauties Russia has to offer because he is himself enchanted by the beauty of the Queen of the swan population, Odette.

Confusion and evil arise in the shape of the Von Rothbart who is keen for his own daughter, Odile, to be the object of Prince’s love. To achieve this he cunningly uses magic to make Odile appear as Odette. His only mistake is to give the baddy a black swan cossy and the goody a white swan cossy, just so the audience can see what is going on.

Here Prince Siegfried is exploring his own consciousness, which consists of his feminine Self, as well as the male. Since men usually have this repressed (darkened- black) in themselves, their inner journey is to bring light their own femininity. The black turns to white, good triumphs over evil ( in moral terms ) and the prince becomes a King.

In the final act the prince expresses his love for Odette and she forgives him for making what was a simple mistake. He has had to learn discrimination and wisdom to show his Kingly understanding of truth. The evil Von Rothbart and imposter Odile are returned to their true bird like (or reptilian ) forms representing the humans who live their lives on automatic pilot.

By returning to the lake and expressing his love for Odette, Siegfried pops the spell like a balloon. They both jump into the lake (something the less inspired may have been waiting for since the interval) and from their ascend into heaven. This represents the process of human spiritual evolution as attributed to great prophets but is accessible even to humble folks like us. At the point of ‘individuation’ or becoming a complete human being, the physical world (the lake) is no longer needed as a learning environment for the soul.

Well, there is my cranky interpretation of a wonderful story. Should something like this be in the programme? Do we really need to know about hidden meanings? Certainly not. These stories were developed and retold because they illumine the human mind without interpretation, just in the telling. In our modern times, thousands of people sit through what is on the face of things a load of nonsense (a fairy story) and go away thinking they know a lot better than the people of the past who used to believe that sort of thing. But they (and particularly children whose minds are more open to symbolism) will have been enchanted  by the whole thing.

That makes them members of the flock of enchanted swans swimming in circles on the lake of life. But fret ye not. Someday your prince will come and take you away, because that is what princes do.